Finding Hope Through Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak

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Sunlight warmed my hair through the window. Leftover laundry from my final year of college was littered around the carpeted floor. My Gameboy SP rested in my hands, and I recalled how at one point my little fingers could barely grasp around it. Now it easily fit within one palm. The battery light flickered between red and green, despite being fully charged. Hamtaro was running across the Sunny Peak fields as my mother walked past my open door.

“That thing still works?” She asked, seeing the game in my hands. “How long have you had it?”

I checked the back of the bright red SP and looked at the peeling stickers. “2002,” I replied.

She smiled and shook her head as she carried on. “Guess we got our money’s worth on it.” She hardly understood how true that was.

Every kid who had a Gameboy had their fair share of generic TV-show spinoff games — the ones that make you think, “When did I even get this?” Most were generic beat-em-ups that stuck the main character on it for profit (looking at you, Kim Possible and Avatar: the Last Airbender). But there was one game I had that was a masterpiece among the rest. Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak came out in 2002, the same year I got my red Gameboy SP at age six. Sixteen years later, the game is muscle memory to me now. Not only does it include delightful artwork and clever puzzles, but also it teaches kids that love isn’t perfect.

To anyone unfamiliar with the character, Hamtaro is an adorable little hamster that is the titular protagonist to a children’s anime cartoon. The show ran on Cartoon Network from 2002–2004, though it was a much bigger franchise hit in Japan and Europe. In each episode, Hamtaro sneaks out of his owner’s cage and goes on adventures with his partner Bijou and their curious hamster friends. Nothing momentous really happens, but it’s a cute feel-good show, which makes Ham-Ham Heartbreak a surprise punch in the feelings. The game opens with Hamtaro having a nightmare about a darkly-clad devil hamster named Spat whose sole mission is to break up happy couples and make people’s lives miserable by poking their hearts with his little pitchfork. But lo, it wasn’t just a dream! Spat has wreaked havoc in Hamtaro’s world — but what already makes the game uniquely relatable is that the disarray isn’t obvious. It’s not like Ganon pummeling Hyrule into ruins (although there is a sick Legend of Zelda Easter egg in this game). The effects of the discord are subtle, like they would be in real life. It is your job as Hamtaro to repair all of the broken hearts and fill the “love meter” enough to defeat Spat once and for all.

Playing for the first time as a six-year-old, I absorbed nothing beyond “Yay, pretty colors!” There are love-related quests that span across several immersive map areas: Sunny Peak fields, Sandy Bay beach, Fun Land amusement park, Boo Manor haunted house, and Wildwoods jungle (which is actually a greenhouse, but to a hamster it’s rather expansive). Later on I realized that the game goes into deeper relationships than standard romantic couples. It delves into more meaningful bonds that a greater variety of children can relate to (because how many six-year-olds know how dating works?)

Love exists within family, but sadly in some cases like mine, not everyone has a full family to turn to when in trouble. This game introduces getting to choose whom you can rely on. In the show, there is a pair of hamsters with a sisterly bond named Pashmina and Penelope. The two are consistently supportive of each other, and Pashmina is known to take the role as Penelope’s protector due to her young age and speech troubles. Upon entering Sandy Bay and hearing its radical electric guitar surfer music, you find Penelope stomping on Pashmina’s belongings menacingly and making her sister cry. But when you enter the next area of the beach, you spot Pashmina trying to rip up Penelope’s blanket that she uses to hide her face. Little Penelope is bawling, and you question, “Wait, how can Pashmina be here if she was just there?” Upon some hamster sleuthing, you learn that Spat had been disguising himself as each of the sisters to drive them apart. In order to learn which is the real Pashmina, you have to instill a “King Solomon”-like choice and reveal that the real sister would never want to hurt Penelope. Through putting the two under stress, the player sees how close their bond is. This instills hope in children that, while maybe not biological, you can choose a family that will be supportive of you. This is only one of the few inspiring missions that go against standard conceptions of “love”.

At the amusement park map called Fun Land, there is a family near the entrance that comprises of a mother, father, and young daughter. The child is bawling because she wants popcorn, and the father is frantic because he cannot find his wallet. It’s comical upon first glance to watch him scramble, but when you see the body language between him and his wife there is immediate tension. She glares at him, rolls her eyes repeatedly, and you can infer that he was teetering on a tightrope in the first place. When you talk to the father, you learn that this guy is struggling to make his family love and respect him. He keeps messing up and feels hopeless, and his wife says he needs to “shape up”. You find his wallet later in the game, and when you bring it to him, a heart glows and fills your meter. I remember being surprised by this and thought,

“This was one of the quests? But Spat didn’t do anything, they’re just there!” Unhappiness can go unnoticed, and this game taught me at a young age to pay attention to people’s emotions and see what they really have to say. I didn’t know how much I would empathize with animated hamsters, but some of the plot hits hard. I brought together a broken family and helped this man get respect from his daughter and wife, and I wondered if families are just like that on their own sometimes. This was before my own family went through hardships.

I don’t discuss it much, but most of my adolescence was shaded with grief. My dad passed away from brain cancer when I was twelve, and it hit me hard. I grew distracted from my schoolwork, and had trouble understanding how my life would be different from then on. A few months later, my oldest sister, Sarah, died. My mother and I were stunned in overwhelming emotion; no one deserves to go through two funerals in such a short time apart. I knew my family would never be “normal” again. No one could fix what happened, and no orange hamster could bring the broken hearts back together.

By my sophomore year of college, I finally had hope that life would be okay. I had good friends, a great academic record, had a job as a graphic designer, and I was taking opera lessons as a hobby. But then came winter, after my opera recital, when my mom drove to campus and take me out to lunch.

“Julia,” she said in the car. I could hear the tenseness in her voice, and my heart dropped. I’d only heard her speak that way when bad news came, and the last time that happened was when Sarah died. I could see the pain in her eyes. “Honey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but your brother Brian has passed away.”

Everything was static. My head hurt from a high-pitched sound that I didn’t realize was my own screaming. The car shook with my convulsing sobs. Of course I felt sadness, and empathy for my mother in losing her son, but also pure anger that this could happen. He was barely thirty. I had been counting down the months until I turned 21 and could get a beer with him. Another knife was hurled into the thin tissue of family I had to begin with.

I was tired of grief — of funerals, pity, and heart-wrenching memories. So I thought I could get around it, and just choke it down and stay strong by distracting myself. I excelled in school — even got an A on my neuroscience final exam on the day after I learned about Brian. I thought I had grown out of grief, that it was immature, but this led to emotional detachment from people around me. I didn’t tell most of my friends, and those who did know tried hard to be supportive. But it was still difficult to find solace in people who could not relate to the same loss I had, so I tried the whole “fake it ’til you make it” for almost a whole semester. One of my nicknames was the “ball on sunshine”, and I was proud that I was able to hide the pain enough to uphold that.

Brian and I loved to discuss video games. We grew up in separate households, so when I got to see him he always had the coolest games and would let me play them when I was little, even the M-rated titles. I remember playing his copy of Trauma Center: Under the Knife and squirming with discomfort while extracting shards of glass and debris from a pulsing virtual heart. He laughed at my reaction and taught me how to play it carefully. His laugh is still clear in my head; it was a hearty one that rose from the chest, and his glasses rose up with his cheeks when he smiled.

The semester after his death, I rediscovered my old Gameboy along with its torn Ziploc bag of games. Upon finding Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak, I inserted the cartridge, desperate for a retreat into childhood — a time when I had a full family and all I had to worry about was what I was going to be for Halloween. I remembered how to get through the maps with each little trick. I cleared the Sunny Peak, the Sandy Bay, and the Fun Land amusement park with no issues. “If I dig through this pipe, I get the blue marble, which when I combine it with the red and green I’ll be able to get the big spoon and use it as a catapult over the castle walls,” I muttered to myself obsessively. Then I reached Boo Manor. I didn’t remember this area as well, but I was engrossed in the art style and the spooky theremin music. There’s a maze-like quality to this map that involves corridors that lead to nowhere, hidden doors, and specter hamsters floating between walls. Upon entering one of the rooms, you as Hamtaro and Bijou are alone with for a sofa, a rug, a few lit candles, and a portrait of a crying woman (well, a crying hamster woman).

You’re about to leave the room to chase after Spat, but Bijou stops. “Did you hear something?” she asks. When you listen closely, you can hear soft sobbing echo against the peeling walls. “I’m positive that I heard someone crying,” Bijou states.

You realize it’s coming from the portrait. Upon examination, the woman in the painting emerges from the canvas and speaks. “My sweet little boy went out to play and hasn’t come home,” she says through tears. “I told him not to go too far, but before I knew it, he vanished. He wanted to go see the Ham Rangers show. I guess I should have taken him to see it.”

This moment, seeing this woman be sad about missed opportunities with a loved one that she could never get back, let something in my mind that was begging to get out click into place. The grief I’d shoved down for months flooded out. I related to this mother who just wanted to see her son again. I wanted my dad, my sister, my brother — anyone that I’d lost — to see me and how much I’d grown. The mission in finding her son is relatively easy: just find all the Ham Rangers so the show can go on, and then his mother sees him and is satisfied. The reuniting moment stuck out to me the most of this entire game, and my eyes watered once more to see them happy again. I wanted to replay this mission alone to feel it all over again.

If a small story like that can affect me in such a way, I wondered how many other people could be touched by this game. How many people are grieving, or part of a fighting family, or in a strained relationship, or going through something that’s invisible to most people? Individual differences between people have always fascinated me, and in part, this is why I chose to study psychology. Playing games like Hamtaro Ham-Ham Heartbreak can help young kids understand raw emotions through a veil of adorable hamsters. As highlighted in the first mission you encounter in Sunny Peak, simply stating “I’m feeling depressed,” can teach kids how important expressing feelings is.

I’m now in my first year of a PhD program in lifespan development psychology. I hope to conduct research on grief in adolescence, and ideally find ways to help young people express their sadness in healthy ways. Repressing my emotions for even just a few months took a physical toll on me — my appetite suffered, I had several moments where I had to find the nearest bathroom to scream and cry and dry-heave, and I grew obsessed with school work and extra activities to distract myself from acknowledging my emotions. I don’t want anyone else to experience what I did. I want people to understand grief, and I want more games to be like Hamtaro.